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Kim Szecsi:
We’ve got Baxter County Judge Litty here with us, and Heather Loftis is here as well. Heather, go ahead and take it away on this Wednesday morning.
Heather Loftis:
We were upstairs taking pictures with our Beat Harrison signs. So the judge was a fabulous football player back in the day. All the Litty boys were. I mean, I heard that everybody played, right? Everybody played.
Judge Litty:
Yeah, yeah.
Heather:
Who’d you play in or who was your head coach?
Judge Litty:
A lot of fun back then. Barney Crawford was our head coach when I was in high school.
Heather:
Were you part of the state championship run?
Judge Litty:
No, I was not. We we made it to the semi-finals my senior year. A lot of fun.
Heather:
Favorite Beat Harrison memories, you got any?
Judge Litty:
Oh yeah. First, Harrison actually got the best of us in high school. We won one out of them three, but my senior year, we went to overtime and lost to them. We were both undefeated in my senior year, us and Harrison. And they won in overtime, 10-3.
Heather:
Did we use to play him at the end of the season?
Judge Litty:
Used to be the last game of the season every year, yeah.
Heather:
Yeah. And that’s when like, we’d make the bet and I mean, Jim Bodenhammer jumped in went off the rope there at Cotter Spring one year on the way home after we beat them.
Judge Litty:
Yeah, he sure did. That was that was my that would have been my junior year.
Heather:
You think we can get Bodenhammer to go off the rope again at Cotter Spring? We can try. It’s pretty low last time I was down there.
Judge Litty:
I’d go with him if he’d go!
Heather:
Hey, there you go. I like that. I like that.
So, Quorum Court meeting was last night. Judge, of course regular routine business. Just some passing some ordinances and funding the budget. Just regular business.
Judge Litty:
Yeah, quick business last night, just normal stuff and you know, we’ve been getting in the swing of getting the 2025 budget lined out for the county and started that a little over a week ago and Ms. Jenay, our treasurer, she’s always pushing us to get that stuff done so she’s priding us all the time so we’re going through it.
Heather:
Yeah, y’all, will you approve that in October, is that typically the business?
Judge Litty:
Hopefully, yes that’s her goal to do it as soon as possible, yeah.
Heather:
And any changes forthcoming or anything you’re looking at?
Judge Litty:
Not a lot. You know, county’s still financially sound right now and good things going on and we’ve been going over the wish list and there’s not a lot to the wish list and I thought there would be, you know, but not a lot, so.
Heather:
What’s at the top of your wish list?
Judge Litty:
Really, and since the day I started to improve and go that extra step with our road program, and I know everybody don’t see that, but a lot do. It affects a lot of people. You know, I said when I started last year, I went an extra mile. I had the road list handed to me last year and I went an extra mile than what was handed to me. And my goal is to do that again this year, which that’s the plan and it’s on schedule to happen. So it affects so many residents and so many people that visit our county to improve our roads. And that’s just a big goal of mine to keep improving.
Heather:
How many employees within road and bridge?
Judge Litty:
Low forties, usually it’s hard to keep… Fully staffed is 43, but it’s just hard to keep that number.
Heather:
And what’s it been like with 43 employees. Now you’re trying to balance the everyday tasks of the county, you know, but then you had the added storm debris removal from the Memorial Day…
Judge Litty:
That’s what I said. You know, it’s easy to plan your schedule until something’s thrown at you that you didn’t plan for. The tornado back in May, we didn’t plan for. It threw a real wrench in what we were trying to do. So, when that happened and once we got everything lined out, we put every employee we had, which is 40 plus, picking up brush. It was running about five crews. And once we got, what I consider, the emergency part of the brush cleaned up, we had to back off and go do our things that we’re obligated to do, like chip and seal and overlay and mowing our right of ways. And that was a goal of mine also to keep our right of ways mowed very well. And we wasn’t doing that, but they come to the point where we had to cut back on our brush pickup crews and do things we’re obligated like chip and seal and overlay. So we’ve already filed for a six month extension with FEMA, which begins sometime in December. That first six months runs out in December. We filed for that six month extension so we can continue to get reimbursed for that brush pickup. We could have very easily contracted a company to do it like Briarcliff, but I felt like we were very well staffed, unlike Briarcliff was not, to do this job ourselves. So when, you know, when things are a little slower as far as our typical mowing, overlaying, chipping, sealing, we can run five crews and we can finish the brush pickup pretty quick.
Heather:
I mean, you can’t help it. You can put your best foot forward and, you know, residents are still going to be frustrated if they still have debris in their front yard. But as we move through through the fall and into the winter months. I mean, you’ll be able to put a lot more resources on that debris pickup too. Right?
Judge Litty:
We’ll have more crews running as soon as we get our road projects done that we’re obligated to do. And, you know, the flood didn’t hit us as bad as it did Marion County. All of our flood damage was down along Denton Ferry, but that pulled our guys off their normal jobs for about 30 days right there to fix them, fixing things down there that got flooded and tore up.
Heather:
For residents who are hearing, “Well, you’re working on all these road projects while we still have debris pickup.” Those were already planned, already scheduled. It’s not anything you could plan. You can adjust. They were, they were all…
Judge Litty:
You know, most of them projects were started. Some was even started prior to me becoming judge. But yeah, so we’d started replacing soft spots, digging up soft spots in roads.
And so were making some of these roads rougher than they were with the soft spots. So we had to go back in and finish them or more complaints would have came from them roads. But anyway, we’re getting it done and we got one more road to chip and seal. We’re finishing overlay down on Denton Ferry and then we’re going to go to County Road 25 and do about two miles of overlay up there and we’ll be back on the brush pick up and hopefully have it done before winter’s over for sure.
Heather:
Is there a road project that, you talked about your wish list earlier, is there a road project that, man, you’d love to see the county be able to get to in 25?
Judge Litty:
My goal is to finish County Road 25, which runs from Highway 201 to Highway 5. Lots of traffic. I’ve had lots of calls, “When are you going to finish this? When are you going to finish this?” Prior to me being elected, they started the 201 North end of 25 and did about three miles. So we’re going to do about two miles this year as all the funds we have to go. Hopefully next year we can go a couple more and finally get that overlaid all the way to Highway 5. But I want to get that road finished.
Heather:
Health Department’s coming along there.
Judge Litty:
We have a meeting. We have a meeting today at 10 o’clock. First meeting we’ve had since it started. And we’re going to start having I believe once a month. And you know, like you said before, we talked about that a long time and we sure did. And I thought that it would be going long before it started. But anyway, it just takes time. And you know, hopefully by next May or June, it’ll be open for business.
Heather:
Well, I’m back on school pickup duty, so I drive by it every day. So I’m happy to be your eyes and ears on the ground.
Judge Litty:
It looks like to me they’ve brought up to grade, I was looking at it this morning, so it’s about up-to-grade, so they’re going to start seeing some more progress out there.
Heather:
Alright Judge. Go Bombers, beat Harrison.
Judge Litty:
Yep. Beat Harrison.
Kim:
Absolutely. And saw some pictures of Denton Ferry Road on Facebook this morning, it’s looking mighty fine. I know a lot of people are going to be happy about that. Thank you both.
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